Subject: acaDIMia in the 90s: a note
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 13:54:59 -0600
I just came across the program for a conference/wankfest on "Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Postmodern Contexts" (gag) and would dearly like to know what the HELL the following paper title is supposed to mean:
"The Pen(is), Castration, and Subjectivity: Abelard's Negotiations of Gender"
"PEN(IS)"????? This is bracketing run amok--I know the twelfth century and can say with confidence that there's no record of Abelard writing his name in the snow, and furthermore I'm getting damn sick of these tittering postmodern airheads who never tire of the adolescent thrill of finding an excuse to say "cunt" or "penis" in professional company and who don't know the difference between a noun and a verb (why should they when they deal exclusively in unglossed neologisms, having abandoned the King's English years ago). These yammering masturbators defy parody; they are the academic equivalent of those artists who shit into a Dixie cup and put it on display as a "piece." We all think about sex and watch videos and play around on the Web, but it takes a special blend of hypocrisy and chutzpah to pass these activities off as historical research and to substitute haphazard free-association and frivolous obscurantism for scholarship. Grrrrrr...the purge, it is overdue.
Mightier than the s(word),
jo
From: djm8@cornell.edu(NO_SPAM) (Jo Miller)
Subject: dear survivors
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 1996 9:38
Nancy, I've never been to [famous big-ass conference] (hope I never will), but your description of the dynamic there fits the suspicions I already had.
Saturday is Chaucer day. Session 1 of the 47 Canterbury Tales panels will include the papers:
- 'Nun's Priest or Nunpriest?: Chaucer's [Un?]EN-gendering of the Hermaphrodytic Religious Experience'
- 'O Say Cunte You See: Middle English Ribaldry, Female Negotiations of Meaning, and the Vaginal Eye.'
jo
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